Tuesday, August 7, 2007

Going virtualized

One of the problems I have always had was e-mail. Work e-mail, home e-mail, junk accounts... I always wanted to have everything in a single place. But often it was not possible.
I lived with this issue until today when I thought how to end the multiple accounts nightmare.
What I did was somehow weird for me.
I have created a Dovecot IMAP server inside a virtual machine and I have moved all my emails to this server. Simple enough - QEmu did it's job very well.
But this success made me consider an even stranger solution.
I am using Windows only for a few operations (MS Project, Nokia PC suite, ...) so I am booting it quite seldom. It means that could create a virtual machine with windows, using only a fraction of the real partition size I am using now, install on the virtual machine the software I cannot use in Linux and share the rest of the gained space between the host and the virtualized windows via Samba.

It worked well this time also.
I have gained in this way a nice Windows appliance securized behind my Linux firewall. I can use it to experiment a lot off things as it runs smoothly with 512 Mbytes of RAM allocated.

No comments:

Post a Comment